


no homo, but that's the day i fell in love with you

by tamerofdarkstars



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Dancing, Fluff, Inspired by that one gif you guys know the one, M/M, Mutual Pining, Yule Ball (Harry Potter)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-02
Updated: 2019-04-02
Packaged: 2019-12-30 18:48:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,499
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18321134
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tamerofdarkstars/pseuds/tamerofdarkstars
Summary: He stood up abruptly, palms suddenly insanely sweaty. He wiped them on his dress robes, hoping against hope the motion was casual, and then stuck his hand out to Dean.Dean looked at his hand, then up at him. “What?”“Let’s get out there!” Seamus declared, waving his hand in Dean’s face, as if the reason he hadn’t taken it immediately was maybe that he didn’t notice it was there. “It’s a dance, innit?”





	no homo, but that's the day i fell in love with you

**Author's Note:**

> i absolutely almost named this fic "two bros chillin at the yule ball". 
> 
> so this is teeeeeechnically a follow up to my other fic, pretending i was fred astaire, but they can be read independent of each other. 
> 
> please note! title is from the song ["the bro duet"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nlescnjL8Y) by alexander sage oyen, a song i highly recommend you all go listen to
> 
> also, my classic harry potter fic disclaimer - i'm insanely american, so any mistakes in the slang are all mine!

Things were sort of winding down by now, and honestly, why had he built this up in his head so much? Turned out dances were sort of boring – just a lot of sitting around and getting snapped at by Lavender for not asking her to dance enough. Which, hey, Seamus had danced like three times with her. Wasn’t that enough? His feet hurt and actually dancing properly was hard.

Plus, if he was tied up with Lavender then he couldn’t hang with Dean, which was the only thing that was keeping him sane, since Neville had abandoned them almost immediately to dance with Ginny. They looked like they were having fun, though. Seamus tilted his head, studying his friend, laughing unabashedly as he and Ginny went around and around in a little circle.

“Now see,” he said, gesturing grandly at the floor. “That actually looks like fun! How come he’s out there having fun?”

Dean shrugged one shoulder at him. Lavender had abandoned them, off to commiserate with Parvati and Padma, no doubt, since Harry seemed to have vanished somewhere along with Ron ages ago, leaving the twins to fend for themselves.

Seamus glanced at his friend, eyes skittering up Dean’s forearms, where he’d rolled the sleeves of his dress robes up, then up to his throat, where he’d undone the upper button, then finally up to his face.

Wasn’t like he was _blind_ or anything, alright, he was perfectly capable of recognizing an attractive person when he saw one, and Dean Thomas was an attractive person.

It was… fact. Like the sun rising in the sky. Or something.

“Dunno. Didn’t really dance much.”

Seamus blinked. “What? Come on, that’s the whole point. Even McGonagall was out there.”

Dean cracked a smile. “She was, wasn’t she? Kinda weird seeing all the professors out there.”

Seamus shrugged, stretching his arms up above his head, feeling the tug in his muscles before slumping back into a slouch with a sigh. “I s’ppose. I mean, I guess they’re people too, right?”

“I guess,” Dean said. He contemplated the floor for half a second, which was still reasonably full despite the lateness of the hour. “Guess I could go find someone to dance with.”

Seamus perked up. “Now you’re talkin’,” he said, twisting in his chair to scan the floor. “Let’s see… a perfect girl for Dean.”

He spotted a Hufflepuff standing alone near one of the windows, watching the dancers with a smile on her face. She was cute, petite and mousy-haired, bouncing on the balls of her feet in time to the music. An image flashed behind his eyes, an image of Dean holding out his hand to the pretty girl by the window, a shy smile on his face. Dean would pull her onto the floor, sweeping her around as they stepped in unison together, steps that McGonagall had drilled into them.

Step, step, step, underneath the glistening faerie lights overhead. Dean would smile warmly, dip his head… she’d have to go up on her toes…

Something hot twisted in Seamus’ stomach and he shook his head. Not her. Someone else.

He scanned the hall again, spotting another girl he didn’t recognize, this one with a wrist-cuff on in Ravenclaw blue, standing over near one of the columns. She was chatting with an older boy Seamus vaguely recognized from the Gryffindor table at breakfast and he could see it clearly this time – Dean walking over and tapping her on the shoulder, awkwardly interrupting her conversation, but being so helplessly charming that she agreed to a dance.

She was closer to Dean’s height – boy was sprouting like a bloody weed, honestly, it was offensive – so they wouldn’t hardly have to bend at all for Dean to lean in close and brush a kiss against her lips.

Not like Seamus, for example. Hell, Seamus would probably have to stand on tiptoe, and Dean wasn’t even finished growing yet! When the hell was Seamus’ growth spurt going to kick in, that’s what he’d bloody like to know. Kissing Dean would be much easier if he were taller.

It struck Seamus then that he wasn’t even looking in the girl’s direction anymore. He was staring blankly into space, thinking about kissing his best friend.

Heat flamed in his cheeks. Alright, it wasn’t like it was the first time the thought had crossed his mind, but usually that kind of thinking was best done by himself, somewhere where he could really get into some proper daydreaming. Like at night, before he fell asleep, drowsy on that knife-edge between consciousnesses. Or during Trelawney’s class. Or Binns’.

Never McGonagall’s though, he’d learned that lesson.

It took Seamus a moment to realize that Dean was talking to him and he shook his head sharply, forcing himself to pay attention. “Huh?”

Dean smirked, clearly amused. “What, off in your own little world, there? Get distracted by the girls?”

Not hardly, but then Seamus couldn’t right well tell Dean that, now could he? He tossed a smirk back instead. “You know it.”

And it’s not like Seamus didn’t get distracted by girls, sure. It was just that right now, he couldn’t imagine being distracted by any of the girls out on the floor when Dean bloody Thomas was right here, prime distraction material.

He might want to apologize to Lav, now that he thought of it.

Dean was studying him, a look on his face that Seamus couldn’t quite read. He raised an eyebrow at his best friend, a bit unnerved, since he could usually read Dean Thomas like a book. Sure they weren’t Parvati and Lavender levels of telepathic but then, no one was. “What?”

“Someone caught your eye out there, then?” Dean asked, feigning for casual and missing by entire kilometers.

Seamus snorted before he could stop himself. “Don’t be ridiculous.”

A thought struck him then, the same kind of insistent thought that usually struck just before he experimented in a Charms class and ended up re-singing his eyebrows off for the billionth time. A _what if_ type of thought.

He stood up abruptly, palms suddenly insanely sweaty. He wiped them on his dress robes, hoping against hope the motion was casual, and then stuck his hand out to Dean.

Dean looked at his hand, then up at him. “What?”

“Let’s get out there!” Seamus declared, waving his hand in Dean’s face, as if the reason he hadn’t taken it immediately was maybe that he didn’t notice it was there. “It’s a dance, innit?”

Dean stared at him. “You want to dance. With me?”

“Oh, no, you’re right, my mistake, it was my other best friend named Dean,” Seamus snarked. His heart was pounding wildly in his chest, muffling the sound of the music in his ears, and he was one hundred percent positive that his palms were sweaty again.

But Dean was shaking his head disbelievingly, a slow grin spreading across his face. “You’re mental,” he informed Seamus, and slapped his hand into his, using Seamus to leverage himself to his feet.

Seamus rolled his eyes. “Ha ha, come on, I’m going to stomp all over your toes.”

“Not if I stomp on yours first,” Dean shot back, and tugged him towards the dance floor.

They shuffled up to the edge of a group of Hufflepuffs, laughing and clapping along with the beat and it wasn’t until Dean turned to face him expectantly that Seamus realized exactly what this was going to entail. As usual, he’d leaped into something before thinking about it, because maybe if he’d spared more than half a second to consider the idea, he would have realized that this would involve hands on waists and shoulders and standing close enough that there was no way Dean wasn’t going to figure out something was up.

Seamus swallowed hard past the lump in his throat. “Guess we both can’t dance the bloke’s part, huh?” he asked and Dean smirked.

“Might be tough. Wanna be the girl?”

“Piss off,” Seamus growled, but put his hands in the appropriate spots. Dean was warm, the material of his dress robes soft under Seamus’s horribly sweaty fingers. He wished he’d been able to wipe them on his own robes again, but then Dean was standing close to him, taking his hand and curling them together and then they were dancing, stumbling into a more or less workable rhythm.

For several seconds they were silent, both staring off into space as they focused on not actually stepping on each other. Or, at least, that’s what Seamus assumed Dean was doing because that’s sure as hell what he himself was doing.

They pivoted and then Dean stepped down squarely on Seamus’s right foot, crushing his big toe. Seamus yelped, yanking his foot back and nearly kicking the girl behind him as he did so, and their rhythm stumbled to a halt.

“Damn,” Dean said, breathless, eyes wide. “Sorry.”

Seamus snorted. “Maybe you should dance the girl’s part,” he teased, wiggling his foot as the pain faded from his toe. “Bloody hell, Dean, are you trying to break my toes?”

Dean scowled at him, color in his cheeks. “I’m _trying_ to dance with you.”

The smile slid off Seamus’s face. “Come on, I was only kidding. Here.” He stuck out his hand and grabbed Dean’s, replacing it on his waist. For a second, he didn’t move, holding Dean’s hand still against his own hip, and looked up into the face of his best friend.

“We should have just gone together in the first place,” he said, his mind completely ignoring any sense of self-preservation and spitting out the most horrifying sentence of his life. Dean’s eyebrows shot up to meet his hairline and Seamus felt his cheeks go blazing hot.

“I mean, you know,” he said, digging the hole deeper. “We’d probably have had more fun from the beginning. And we wouldn’t’ve pissed off the girls.”

Dean looked down at him wordlessly for a moment, studying him as if he’d never seen him before in his life. Seamus realized with a start that he was still holding Dean’s hand against his hip and spent a frantic second trying to decide if it was more awkward to leave it there, or more awkward to let go so embarrassingly late.

“So why didn’t you?”

“Huh?” Seamus was torn out of his to-move-his-hand-or-not-to-move-his-hand panic by the question. “Why didn’t what?”

Dean swallowed. “Why didn’t you ask me?”

Seamus gaped at him, thunderstruck. “Because, mate,” he said weakly. “We’d already agreed to find dates.”

He could remember the conversation like it had happened right there on the dance floor. They’d been talking about the Ball, buzzing with gossip like every single other student in the entire school after the announcement.

“Suppose we’ll have to learn to dance,” Seamus remembered saying, the thought ludicrous. Merlin, if his parents could see him _dance_. He could be tap dancing up on the bloody dinner table and they still would have trouble believing him.

“And find someone to dance with,” Dean had added. Seamus remembered exactly how he’d been sitting – leaning back in his chair, his long legs propped up against Seamus’s thigh. “That’ll be the thing, won’t it?”

Seamus remembered studying Dean’s socked foot against his leg. Remembered laughing. Remembered it being particularly warm in the Common Room. “Guess we’ll have to start wearing down the girls, huh?”

Dean had hesitated – or had he? – just for an instant. “Like any girl would agree to dance with you,” he’d teased, shoving at Seamus’s thigh with his toes. Seamus had laughed and the conversation had dissolved into a discussion about their latest transfiguration essay.

Dean shrugged one shoulder. “I s’ppose.”

Seamus examined him. “You didn’t ask me either,” he pointed out. Around them, couples were still dancing, moving in time to the beat of the song, but Seamus and Dean were stopped still, as though they’d cast their own personal bubble charm and kept the rest of the world at bay.

Dean cleared his throat. He mumbled something that Seamus absolutely could not hear over the music and the thundering of his own heart. He frowned. “Huh?”

Dean scowled at the floor. “I said, I was going to.”

Seamus’s heart stopped, then picked up again at double the speed, pounding a frantic erratic rhythm against his ribs. “You were?”

“That day in the dormitories,” mumbled Dean, looking miserable. His fingers were tight against Seamus’s hip, other hand clenched in a fist at his side. “But you came in and were all excited about asking Lav. So I… didn’t.”

Seamus stared at him, trying to remember what day Dean was even talking about. It hit him in a rush, the memory of telling Dean that Lavender had agreed to go to the Ball with him. He’d been so twitchy with the adrenaline of asking her to be his partner that he hadn’t noticed… hadn’t even thought there might be something different. He and Dean had even gone to get food afterwards, to celebrate.

Suddenly, Seamus felt a little sick. “Dean,” he said weakly, but Dean was already shaking his head.

“Doesn’t matter. Too late now anyway.”

An idea struck Seamus, an idea that made butterflies leap in his stomach, even as he grinned at the thought. “Not quite!” he said cheerfully, and put his hand on Dean’s shoulder.

Dean raised an eyebrow. “What are you--”

“Well, Mr. Thomas,” Seamus said, adopting the poshest accent he could muster, and was pleased to see a smile crack across Dean’s face. “Seeing as how my date has up and run off with Potter’s date, it seems my dance card has suddenly opened up.”

Dean started to laugh but Seamus barreled on, ignoring him for favor of the performance.

“It would honor me greatly,” he declared, going over the top now into the completely ridiculous, just to keep that grin on Dean’s face, “if you, Dean Reginald Thomas--”

“ _Not_ my middle name, you prick--”

“--would do me the honor of dancing out the night with me. Honorably.” Seamus was on the verge of laughing himself, struggling to keep the character on his face, and Dean snorted, shaking his head.

“Why, Seamus Alonzo Finnegan--”

Seamus burst out laughing. “Alonzo!” he wheezed and Dean broke, huffing a laugh before forcing a mock-serious look back on his face.

“--nothing would give me greater joy!”

Seamus tilted his head, his laughs fading into a grin. “Be my date to the Ball?” he asked, dropping the fake posh accent and meeting Dean’s eyes.

Dean’s giggles quieted. “Obviously,” he said, that familiar sideways tilt to his lips as he smiled at Seamus.

_Shoulda just done this in the first place,_ Seamus thought. _Stupid_.

“Let’s see how many toes we can break,” he said, grabbing both of Dean’s hands in his, and giving him a yank, forcing him into a stumbling spin. Dean laughed, the sound swelling in Seamus’s chest.

Huh. So maybe dancing could be kind of fun after all.

Imagine that.


End file.
